November seems to have flown by as several long awaited deadlines are creeping up on me quickly - I can tell it's getting to be that time of the year Professor Crump calls "the silly season". For many students, the weeks before Thanksgiving break are when all of those smaller assignments from earlier start materializing into that one comprehensive project which was assigned at the very beginning of the semester (AKA that huge important project that is mentioned at some point every class period, but has some blissfully distant end-of-November due date). After two years at the U, I figured out that around the time everyone starts talking about their Thanksgiving break plans, the "silly season" has begun and it's time to get busy.
Although it can get stressful at times, the increased brain activity tends to get my creative juices flowing and I feel pretty proud of the work I've done so far this semester. In the past few days I have been working on a variety of different projects such a grant proposal, a research matrix, and a preliminary image of a 3-D paper model that I'll eventually end up constructing (a representation of Frank Gehry's Nationale-Nederlanden Building in Prague). Frank Gehry is by far my favorite designer and I feel so proud to have a piece of his work right on campus!

Along with the schoolwork pileup, despite my best efforts, also came a fair bit of procrastination. This time, however, I did my best to make it what I like to call productive procrastination. While procrastinating in the design computer labs in McNeal earlier this week, I found out how fun the spiral line tool on Adobe Illustrator can be. I had such a great time making a typographic shape of Minnesota, I decided that I would make a few different states each day. Depending on my procrastination impulses, I should have a complete 60-inch wide United States typographic map within two weeks. It'll be awesome! I'll post a picture of it when I finish.

Have a great week!

Jesse LaMaack, Housing Studies